Proxmox VE - TASK ERROR: CT is locked (snapshot-delete)

During an issue with a defective storage solution, I had temporarily (as in not added to fstab) mounted an external USB disk under /mnt/usb-disk on a Proxmox server to keep the backups flowing. A day and a reboot later, those backups started to fill up the local storage instead with unfortunate consequences. As they say, you really can’t fix stupid.

Dell XPS 15 9570 is missing BIOS updates

My Dell XPS 15 9570 laptop is currently running the Fedora Linux distribution and receives firmware updates automatically from the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS). So far so good, but I recently became aware that the same firmware version is not provided on Dell’s drivers and downloads page.

IPFS error: Resource limits were exceeded

For a while now, my IPFS node has complained about resource limits being exceeded. Sadly, I’ve not had any time to look into the issue. Speaking of, what kind of miserable bastard would spend their Christmas holiday troubleshooting an IPFS node? Ah yes, that would be me.

Joe Nobody tries to take down a crypto scammer

Annoying e-mail spam lures Joe Nobody out of his slumber to once again try to convince service providers to pull the plug on a scammer. Welcome to another installment of Joe Nobody VS world.

Does Instagram have a sense of humor?

With the unfortunate demise of Bibliogram, I decided to bite the bullet and sign up for an Instagram account. It was not an easy decision to make, but there are a few athletes I need to keep an eye on. I mean, for sports betting purposes.

Switching up cloud providers and deploying Arch Linux

After a few years with the Finnish cloud platform provider UpCloud, I decided to move my services to Germany and try out Hetzner Online. UpCloud has been excellent, but I felt like it was time for a change, and Hetzner Online offers a lot of bang for your bucks.

Bluetooth connection issues on Slackware 15.0

I wanted to enjoy a lazy Saturday morning by listening to some black metal on my Slackware 15 installation. However, before I could get to that, I had to connect my Samsung soundbar to my Slackware machine over Bluetooth. Unexpectedly, after establishing a connection, the devices immediately disconnected.

Proxmox VE and the case of an unresponsive GUI

For the second time this year, our old FreeNAS storage platform went offline and left our Proxmox VE 6.4 servers in a continuous state of distress. This issue renders the Proxmox VE GUI unresponsive and thus unable to display information about the virtual servers it’s running.

Unable to update device firmware: fwupdx64.efi cannot be found

I can’t remember ever having an issue with updating the firmware of my XPS 13 7390 on Ubuntu. Today, however, Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri) decided to throw an ugly-looking warning in my face after proudly proclaiming that it had a new device firmware update ready to be installed. To add insult to injury, Ubuntu told me to reboot the system to install the new firmware, after GNOME Software correctly informed me that it had failed.

The Mozilla Observatory has become an embarrassment

I find great value in much of Mozilla’s technical documentation and resources. However, the current state of the Mozilla Observatory can hardly be described as anything other than an embarrassment. I believe it’s high time the people behind the project start to eat their own dog food.

How did a subdomain on cancer.org end up serving porn?

A few days ago I discovered several referral spam links to the domain servicematch.cancer.org in my server logs. Spam referrals are usually a part of some blackhat SEO campaign used to generate traffic, and if possible, get the URL listed on a website’s public statistics page.

Content warning: This article contains mildly sexually explicit text and images.

Onionsite has disconnected

With the release of Tor Browser 11.0, I remembered that I have an onion site so I figured it was a good time to see how it was doing. However, I must have been sleeping in class because the Tor Browser informed me that the site was most likely offline.